STUFF HAPPENS-OR DOES IT?

Dear Readers,
Let's face it, we all let the economy down this past Christmas season by not shopping enough. As we've learned over the last few months, the US economy has basically come down to selling stuff - most of which we don't make in this country anymore - to each other. But I read the other day about a retiree in England who not only did more for her nation's economy by shopping so compulsively that her house was completely stuffed with stuff, but actually died as a result of all her stuff caving in on her and suffocating her. True story. I swear.
It seems that the poor lady fell victim to her addiction on Christmas Eve, as she had returned home from a shopping foray with her automobile jam-packed with clothing, appliances and other such season-appropriate purchases. She probably died as a result of trying to find a little room in her small house to put all the new items, causing years-worth of unused and unremembered buys to entomb her. She is said to have had over 100 tea-kettles - however did she make a cup of tea?
I never knew anybody that do-lally, but I did once have a friend who had a floor-to-ceiling wall of LPs. For those of you under the age of 30, LPs were long-playing records that people used to buy at record stores which were... (crumbs! I'm going to have to start footnoting these blogs, in the unlikely event that someone under 30 can tear themselves away from vlogs long enough to read this)...anyway, he had such a huge collection of LPs, arranged on - what looked to me -a really rickety-rackety steel-shelf arrangement. I wondered if someday I would hear about his being crushed to death, his shelves having collapsed, bringing a tsunami of rock, soul, folk and classical down on his head. Did that poor lady in the UK suffer, at the last, from any music abuse? I wonder.
No such worries for the modern music-collector. Nowadays, you can carry your entire music collection up your nose, practically. The ipod, the memory stick and other such devices allow you to walk the streets with the vast sweep of musical past and present at your beck and call. Forget something? No problem, just log on to the interweb and download that missing Lil' Wayne track from a free music-sharing site. And as you walk beneath that skyscraper where, on the 44th floor, a music executive quietly seethes at your action, (and the millions of others who do much the same thing) shed a small crocodile tear for the coming extinction of mega-record companies.
As a borderline luddite, which means...oh, hell...(insert link to wikipedia here), I must take a rare side with the modern music user, as I only wish that something like mass-sharing of music was available in my youth.
Sales of the LPs successor, the music CD...(look it up in wikipedia) have fallen off a cliff of late, not merely as a result of the weak economy, but also because of on-line sharing. While the sales of single songs on Itunes and the like have increased, they don't come close to making up the megabucks that CDs used to bring in. It's a double win for the consumer, as they can get the songs they want, and avoid having to pay for the self-indulgent filler that make up the content of 95% of album-length recordings. Don't worry about the artistes, as they will more than make up for royalty losses through touring and licensing fees. The free custom-hospitality suites for inflated musical egos will still be there in future, trust me.
While all this music flying around in 'the cloud' is great, something is lost - the album graphics.
LPs were the best, once. When artists began to sell so many units that they became indispensable to the record-company bottom-line, they began to have their visual-art way on the covers of LPs, which was an extra delight to record-buyers, as they had something really cool to look at while listening to the sides(often in states of mind-alteration). Today, record sleeves mean nothing to a downloader, and very little to the lesser-spotted CD buyer. As an artist, my feelings are hurt, a bit. But, I suppose in the age of multitasking, nobody just listens anyway.
So we don't buy enough music, don't buy enough cars, just plain don't buy enough stuff anymore - what is society to do? I see a future where the blackberry-texting-iphoning generation of today grumbles about their kids, who are getting the chips implanted in their skulls that allow them to listen to their favorite tunes by just thinking about what they want to hear, as they communicate telepathically with their friends. But what will today's generation of young trendies have that will fall in on their heads and kill them bizarrely, having accumulated so little in the way of possessions? Maybe some will choke on their old, free-file-share-stuffed Ipod, as the spirit of some long-dead record company executive looks down and smiles benignly.
Well, not having done my bit lately for Mother Economy, I have only the one kettle, which I will set to boiling just as soon as I finish this. For somewhere, it's 4 o'clock, and time for a cup of tea.